Brothers bring it together

The Kahn boys share a lot of memories working for their parents’ organic produce store in Bondi Junction in the 1990s. For Danin, the eldest, it was the peanut butter machine, for Tirone it was labelling seemingly endless mountains of food packets with stickers of ingredients, while for Landon the youngest it was standing on a milk crate behind the counter to serve customers and work the till.

So when it came to their careers, creating their own businesses seemed like the most natural option and working together as they do now, a natural progression. “The thing about working with your brothers is that you just know what they are good at and you don’t need to have the same level of detailed discussion around what each of you will contribute to the business,” says Danin Kahn, who at 34 is eldest in the family and chief executive of Todae Solar. “It really enhances productivity when you’ve got that level of honesty underlying the company.”

With a background in graphic design, Danin had run a number of web-based companies before buying into a small online solar power retailer in 2006. At the time, his brother Tirone was the general manager of online retailer Dinosaur Deals, while Landon was finishing off a Bachelor of Business and International Studies at the University of Technology Sydney.

The youngest in the family, Landon had worked on and off for his brothers over the years, having cut his entrepreneurial teeth at 16 with a soccer newsletter and then outsourcing what he knew about search engine optimisation to his brother’s business. By the end of high school he was doing so much work with Danin’s previous business, GlassOnion, that his mother picked up the phone to intervene so he could get some time to study.

The brothers smile about it because what they share is a common commitment to business and growth.

Danin rebranded the company as Todae and began expanding its product offering as well as it’s online presence, bringing in Landon to work on the web marketing and promotion side of things.

Later Tirone joined the field and the three split the company into Todae Solar, which focuses on the installation and support of electricity generating solar panels, and Todae.com.au an online shop for sustainable products.

“The thing that makes the business work is the pre-existing relationship and in our case we’ve always got on really well,” Danin says. “We’ve never created a specific boundary around work but we don’t tend to talk about work when we’re not in a work environment. If something negative has happened, then we deal with it at work and we don’t carry it over to the weekend when we get together as a family.”

The director of the Family Business Resource Centre, Harry Kras, says sibling-run enterprises benefit hugely from the level of knowledge siblings have of each other but can suffer when they fail to manage each others’ expectations of the business.

“The beauty of siblings is that they are deeply aware of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so when they go into a commercial venture they can very quickly establish who should take different roles in the company,” Kras says. “They often also share and understand the level of commitment it takes to run your own business because they have watched their parents go through the process while they were growing up.”

This is certainly true for Caroline and Melissa Shawyer who learned the finer points of the sales cycle from their father at the kitchen table, and now work together in their own company the PR Group.

“Our dad would take the salt and pepper shakers and explain the difference between selling features and selling benefits,” recalls Caroline Shawyer. “The features are how it’s ground and the benefit is the flavour it gives to food. It was like a game that we played from a very early age.”

For Melissa, the main memory is listening to her father giving his sales team a pep talk and discussing the work they had coming through the pipeline, a dual focus she’s never entirely lost.

“It was something about looking at your successes in the longer term and having a long-term road map, so if one year business goes down, or even backwards, you’ll still go forward the next year,” Melissa says.

Although both worked in public relations and marketing roles it wasn’t until 2006 that Caroline asked Melissa to join her in the company she’d started two years before.

“My background was in technology public relations and I’d worked with lots of start ups in Silicon Valley and Australia, whereas Melissa had worked in marketing roles for very large companies,” Caroline says. “Our skills were really complementary, so it just made sense for me to ask her into the business when I needed to take it to the next level and because she knew how to work with big budgets on massive campaigns, whereas I was the one with the start-up experience.”

And while the success of sibling businesses is largely derived from a healthy pre-existing family relationship, it’s important to remember not to bring parents in to break up business disputes, even if they have played a key role in mentoring the founders and developing the business.

“The roots of sibling rivalry lie when siblings feel they have been unfairly treated by one or another parent, so it’s a good idea to have an independent arbitrator to solve disputes if they arise,” Kras says.

BRW

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